The TAG array of a multiple sequence alignment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Olbrich, Jannik, Ohlebusch, Enno
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Olbrich, Jannik
Ohlebusch, Enno
author_facet Olbrich, Jannik
Ohlebusch, Enno
contents Modern genomic analyses increasingly rely on pangenomes, that is, representations of the genome of entire populations. The simplest representation of a pangenome is a set of individual genome sequences. Compared to e.g. sequence graphs, this has the advantage that efficient exact search via indexes based on the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is possible, that no chimeric sequences are created, and that the results are not influenced by heuristics. However, such an index may report a match in thousands of positions even if these all correspond to the same locus, making downstream analysis unnecessarily expensive. For sufficiently similar sequences (e.g. human chromosomes), a multiple sequence alignment (MSA) can be computed. Since an MSA tends to group similar strings in the same columns, it is likely that a string occurring thousands of times in the pangenome can be described by very few columns in the MSA. We describe a method to tag entries in the BWT with the corresponding column in the MSA and develop an index that can map matches in the BWT to columns in the MSA in time proportional to the output. As a by-product, we can efficiently project a match to a designated reference genome, a capability that current pangenome aligners based on the BWT lack.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_19068
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The TAG array of a multiple sequence alignment
Olbrich, Jannik
Ohlebusch, Enno
Genomics
Data Structures and Algorithms
Modern genomic analyses increasingly rely on pangenomes, that is, representations of the genome of entire populations. The simplest representation of a pangenome is a set of individual genome sequences. Compared to e.g. sequence graphs, this has the advantage that efficient exact search via indexes based on the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is possible, that no chimeric sequences are created, and that the results are not influenced by heuristics. However, such an index may report a match in thousands of positions even if these all correspond to the same locus, making downstream analysis unnecessarily expensive. For sufficiently similar sequences (e.g. human chromosomes), a multiple sequence alignment (MSA) can be computed. Since an MSA tends to group similar strings in the same columns, it is likely that a string occurring thousands of times in the pangenome can be described by very few columns in the MSA. We describe a method to tag entries in the BWT with the corresponding column in the MSA and develop an index that can map matches in the BWT to columns in the MSA in time proportional to the output. As a by-product, we can efficiently project a match to a designated reference genome, a capability that current pangenome aligners based on the BWT lack.
title The TAG array of a multiple sequence alignment
topic Genomics
Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19068